Apple Announces OS X El Capitan at WWDC15

Apple’s Craig Federighi brought the news to the masses, talking about how El Capitan would focus on experience and performance, starting with an overhaul of the Safari web browser. Updates to Safari will allow you to pin sites by dragging the tab bar to the left and you’ll now be able to look at the tabs to see which website is playing audio and from there, mute it.

Spotlight search will now be able to respond to queries in natural language, meaning you can ask it to find things like “documents I worked on in June.”

There’s also a new Notes app and improved Mission Control interface, which now allows for a split view.

The system font has been changed to San Francisco so that it now matches the font on the Apple Watch. The same has been done to iOS 9.

Performance-wise, the upgrades sound impressive. According to Apple, apps now open 1.4 times faster, app switching is twice as fast, and PDF files open up four times faster in the Preview app. Metal, which was introduced on iOS last year, is coming to El Capitan and supplants OpenGL for graphics rendering, allowing rendering efficiency that is up to 40 percent greater. A demo of the Unreal Engine was shown playing on El Capitan and Epic Games reported efficiency improvements up to 70 percent.

OS X El Capitan is available to developers now and the rest of the Mac users will get it for free this fall.

About The Author

Dylan Duarte is a freelance writer who's covered film, television, videogames, and of course tech! He's also an aspiring screenwriter and likes that watching movies is considered "work" because of it. You can follow him on twitter @dylanduarte, but be warned that it's mostly the nonsensical ramblings of a potty-mouth.